Thursday, March 5, 2009

It may surprise all those multi-cult fans, but there are still more than enough people who choose to come to Canada because it does not resemble their home countries. Those guys have no problems with values and freedoms associated with an earlier Canada and they don't believe that our society should be bending backwards, trying to accommodate the very same extremists that drove them out of their home countries in the first place.

In their view, the liberal and left-leaning Canadian intelligentsia is wracked by guilt and contempt for their own intellectual heritage and they do all they can to stand up for radical Islamists whose agendas are more closely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood than to Canadian freedoms.

They, on other hand, the “good-looking” Muslims whom the mainstream media generally ignore, stand with John Stuart Mill in upholding individual freedom and traditional values associated with an earlier Canada.

So spoke Tarek Fatah and Salim Mansur at a recent lunchtime lecture at the offices of the Ontario Bar Association, sponsored by the Speakers Action Group and the Canadian Jewish Civil Rights Association, and in interviews with The CJN.

And here's another article that speaks about a similar trend. Somehow, bending backwards and trying to airbrush Canada from its history did not strengthen the cause of Canadian unity; rather the opposite:

As thinkers such as George Grant and Charles Taylor have correctly observed, an English-Canadian political culture weakened by the denial of its own unique history has contributed to, rather than eased, French Canadians’ worries that the rest of Canada is still committed to building a bicultural society along non-republican and non-assimilative lines.

Obscuring Canada’s colonial past has also made it more difficult for an increasingly diverse country to forge those essential bonds of citizenship and community that all nations depend upon. Newcomers to Canada, if they are exposed to Canadian history and civics at all, are fed a watered-down version that focuses on the country’s recent past — primarily post-Second-World-War history — and the rights and privileges of citizenship.

To this day the history of Canada as told through provincial history curricula and in much of our popular culture remains bereft of the unifying and inspiring civics lessons that past generations derived from the stories associated with the country’s journey from colony to nation-state: its military triumphs, its struggle for democracy and its bicultural foundations.

1 comment:

Your views are matched by Janet Ajzenstat's recent book The Canadian Founding -- John Locke and Parliament which finds interesting views (both right and wrong) about MC in the Confederation Debates. She begins with Charles Taylor's proposition that Canada manifests (a) political and (b) social values and it is urgent to get both right, i.e. to be specific. Her general theme is that (some of the) Fathers of Confederation thought (a) political institutions might provide an appropriate home for J.S. Mill's sort of liberalism within which (b) there was room for social values to vary. I.e. we do not need to "get social values right" or enforce specific ideas, so long as we negotiate politically to maximise liberty, i.e. freedom to vary or differ. She cites J.B. Elshtain's useful observation that liberty was first formulated as immunity (from coercion by the state) but is nowadays often defined as entitlements (demands from the state.)